When I found out how gold was made my eyes and brain freaked out. I never thought about it before. I never thought about Higgs Boson either and still don’t think about that….too much. But our elements….how were they made?

Gold is an element. It’s chemical symbol is Au and is derived from Latin. If you have any gold on you right now, you have something that was made billions of years ago…..before the earth was created! Yep, gold wasn’t made in a volcano and it doesn’t come from our sun. You have an element with 79 protons and 79 neutrons and the only energy that could bring all those particles together took place in a supernova and/or perhaps neutron star collisions. That is where gold is made. Freakin’ awesome!

Isn’t that amazing? Most of the gold in our earth is deep down in the earth’s core (because it’s so heavy it sank to the middle) so the gold that we have on top of the earth came from meteorites and asteroids. South Africa got lucky and was probably hit by an asteroid with a huge amount of gold in it. That’s another amazing thing. If we weren’t bombarded by those things we probably wouldn’t know about gold….and honestly, we wouldn’t exist. Period. Carl Sagan said it, “we are made of star dust.” I’ll let you take a moment and think about that.

Every single living thing on this earth is made of atoms that originated in either the big bang or from star explosions. I can’t add enough wows to this.

Now you know why there’s talk of mining meteors and asteroids (for rare and valuable elements). I’ll just leave it at that.